Robert Silk
Faced
with state of emergency orders related to the Zika virus in seven Florida
counties and counting, tourism bureaus are working to get safety information
out to industry partners and to visitors.
But
those efforts are also being accompanied by questions about whether Gov. Rick
Scott issued the state of emergency prematurely.
“Here
and everywhere, it caught everybody by surprise,” Visit Tampa Bay spokesman
Kevin Wiatrowski said.
When
Scott declared the health emergency on Feb. 3 for Hillsborough County (where
Tampa is located) as well as for Miami-Dade County, Lee County (home to Fort
Myers) and Santa Rosa County in the Panhandle, nine cases of Zika had been
detected in Florida, all of them brought to those counties by travelers who
contracted the virus outside the state.
The
detection of seven more cases by Feb. 8, all contracted elsewhere by travelers,
led Scott to add Broward County (home to Fort Lauderdale), St. John’s County (St.
Augustine) and Osceola County, near the theme parks in the southern Orlando
vicinity, to the emergency order.
In
his Feb. 3 announcement, Scott explained that Florida needs to stay ahead of
the Zika virus.
“We
know that we must be prepared for the worst even as we hope for the best,” he
said.
The
governor’s concerns aren’t without some foundation. Florida and the remainder
of Gulf Coast are the only places in the continental U.S. that are home to the
aedes aegypti mosquito, which is the primary Zika carrier.
To
that end, various Florida tourism bureaus have begun putting the word out about
the importance of protecting against mosquito bites. The Lee County Visitor and
Convention Bureau, for example, sent an email on Feb. 3 to local tourism
industry businesses providing information about Zika but also emphasizing the
county’s two cases were travel-related.
In
the Florida Keys, which hasn’t yet been added to the emergency order, the
Monroe County Tourist Development Council has already posted information on
Zika as well as advice on protecting against mosquitoes, on the fla-keys.com
website.
“We’re
just doing it as a precautionary thing,” said TDC Executive Director Harold
Wheeler, who added that a travel-related Zika case being detected in the Keys
is a likely scenario.
But
Wheeler also said that he questions the decision by Tallahassee to call the
state of emergency, especially in light of the damage it can do to tourism
economies.
“If
you are going to declare it for people who caught it outside the county and
then brought into the area, it’s a little different than if you have cases that
were actually [contracted] in the county,” Wheeler said.
Wiatrowski
said that Visit Tampa Bay has had a lot of calls and emails about Zika and the
emergency order, including from the organizers of booked conventions checking
to see if they should cancel their plans.
Though
he said Tampa faces virtually no public health threat from the virus, the
potential economic impact of the emergency declaration is definitely a
worry.
“Yes,
we are concerned about it, only because people don’t take the time to pay
attention to all of the subtleties of it,” Wiatrowski said of the declaration.
“Even Orlando had troubles with the oil spill in the Gulf, and Orlando doesn’t
even have a beach.”